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Requiem for the Oddities of Isa

By Pete Wells June 12, 2012 1:53 pmJune 12, 2012 1:53 pm

Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times

One time a food critic from another city asked me what kind of food Prune served. I had a hard time answering, because the restaurant seemed uncategorizable to me; the place looked like a bistro, but the menu didn’t look like a bistro menu, or like any other menu in town. Finally I resorted to telling him about the dishes: They serve canned sardines with Triscuits, I said. There’s bone marrow, and a dish that has an octopus tentacle next to a beef tongue.

After a minute, he started nodding. “Quirky,” he said, definitively, reducing all of Prune’s fascinating eccentricities to a word you could put on a press release.

The new and unusual resists tidy descriptions. I supposed you could call Isa quirky, too. It was certainly peculiar.

Opened by Taavo Somer last fall, Isa wasn’t like other restaurants. To get inside in the winter, you had to pass through a hanging quilt by the door that looked as if it had been sewn together by a Bedouin weaver who had lost his mind in the desert. A major portion of the beverage list was dedicated to orange wines, and even the regular old whites and reds were anything but regular; Isa specialized in natural winemakers whose products could get extremely funky.

The menus were written by hand on and around a collage of oddball photos and then run off on a photocopier; if you dropped a lot of acid and then sat down with scissors and glue and a stack of old magazines, and then wrote a lot of food terms and prices, you’d come up with something like Isa’s menu.

As for the food, I wouldn’t call it psychedelic, but it sometimes suggested what would happen if a modern chef spent six months in the wilderness on a vision quest. Mackerel fillet was served alongside the fish’s deep-fried skeleton; plates were scattered with grains and seeds and weeds. At times it was as if the restaurant was trying to create a new kind of cuisine, or perhaps trying to pay tribute to the cuisine of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Why am I talking about Isa in the past tense? Because the people in charge of the food all left the restaurant in the past week, including the chef, Ignacio Mattos; his sous chef, Jose Ramirez Ruiz; and the pastry chef, Pamela Yung, who oversaw the extraordinary breads that Isa baked in the wood-burning oven each day. And without them, the Isa that I knew, the Isa that was a finalist for the James Beard award for the best new restaurant in the country, is gone.

Isa’s owner, Taavo Somer, said the restaurant had diverged from his original vision. “I always imagined Isa to be a casual, friendly, wood-fired place with Mediterranean cuisine that would be enjoyed by the neighborhood, families and friends, a few times a week,” he told Diner’s Journal on Monday. In March, he told Bon Appétit that he’d initially envisioned “pasta and roast chicken,” before Mr. Mattos began to go in another direction.

Now it sounds as if there will be no more fried fish skeletons at Isa. I can see the arguments for that. One of the problems with Isa was that the menu was somewhat limited, with just a few core items that didn’t change substantially. If I lived in the neighborhood, I’m not sure how often I’d find myself craving, say, the dessert of celeriac purée that Eric Asimov described as “punishing” in his wary but admiring one-star review.

But Williamsburg has no shortage of restaurants serving roast chicken and pasta. Places with a distinctive point of view come along much less often, and kitchens that express that point of view convincingly are rare in any neighborhood at any time.

Isa, under its former kitchen team, could almost be described as an experimental restaurant. Not all of its experiments worked, but enough of them did to make dinner at Isa a fun and engaging evening. You could try to call it quirky if you wanted, but Isa was the kind of restaurant you couldn’t sum up in a word.